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Cars Suck, Reason #32370

=v= A teevee ad depicts a father teaching his son to drive, taking over the parking, and nearly causing an accident. His response is to chuckle indulgently at

Message 1 of 2
, Mar 2, 2001

=v= A teevee ad depicts a father teaching his son to drive,
taking over the parking, and nearly causing an accident. His
response is to chuckle indulgently at his oopsie. Teach 'em
young. Just to ice the cake, the ad ends on the car's new
brand name motto: "Wake Up And Drive."

=v= Another teevee ad is using The Specials' "Enjoy Yourself"
as background music. "Enjoy yourself/It's later than you think/
Enjoy yourself/The world is on the brink." Yeah, it sure is,
thanks to CARS!!!

=v= The Specials aren't about cars, dammit! They're about
racial harmony and getting around town on little two wheeled
vehicles (Raleigh Twenties come to mind) while wearing snappy
two-toned clothes and porkpie helmets.
<_Jym_>

P.S.: All teevees should sport "Kill Your Automobile" stickers.

De Clarke

Some thoughts on cars as culture, and the *other* reasons people drive -- besides laziness or a subconscious hostility to all life forms including themselves

Message 2 of 2
, Mar 6, 2001

Some thoughts on cars as culture, and the *other*
reasons people drive -- besides laziness or a
subconscious hostility to all life forms including
themselves :-) (warning, this is long and rambling)

Across the street from me is the yuppie dotcom
family with two parents, two little kids, and five
cars. These are car-culture folks to the max -- not
old-money people who pay others to service their
fleet, but nouveaux riches who grew up with hot
rods, and now have more money to buy more hot rods
and dirt bikes :-) they have two boys, one going
on four or so, the other around 2 I think.

Practically every toy the boys play with is a car or
a motorcycle imitation. They don't have trikes --
they have a little plastic pedal car and a little
plastic pedal "motorbike" with training wheels.
When one of them had a birthday recently, the
parents rented one of those inflatable
trampoline/cages -- you know, the kids go inside and
bounce around on the air cushion, behind netting
walls. The whole darned thing, about 15 ft high,
was in the shape of a giant offroad truck.

Dad spends quite a few of his weekends off-road
motorcycling at places like Laguna Seca, and his
evenings tuning up the various vehicles in the
fleet. Sometimes he and his brother ride mini-bikes
around and around and around *in the back yard*
(this is in a suburban residential neighbourhood,
not out in the sticks btw). The kids sit watching,
mesmerized. You just know they are dreaming of being
big enough and old enough to ride a "real" bike
that goes Vrroom.

I have a strong sense of nostalgia as I watch all
this, because I too grew up not with a silver spoon
so much as a 13mm box-end wrench in my mouth :-)
Cars are a way of life as well as a commodity item
and a status symbol and a laziness-enabler. This
guy works really hard on his cars (and his four
motorcycles). They're his obsession, like gardening
or gourmet cooking or collecting stamps. My family
used to rebuild engines together :- )

The Jesuits used to say "give us the child until he
is seven" meaning that cultural/religious
indoctrination is more effective during early
childhood than at any subsequent time. Obviously
this is not a sure thing, or there would never be
rebellions against any established order -- human
society would just go on the same century after
century with everyone behaving/thinking exactly as
they're acculturated. But early childhood
experiences are very powerful (one reason why
advertisers are so interested in getting more access
to children). Growing up in a family such as the
one I describe has to make it very hard to question
the primacy of the automobile. Heck, it took
me some 15 years away from home to get a clue,
despite questioning all sorts of other social
conventions first :-)

One thing that makes anti-car work so hard is that
people like this are deeply, emotionally bonded to
their cars and the amateur mechanic culture. Tell
them Cars are Bad and you're attacking their family,
their traditions, their pet hobby. The same kind of
impasse occurs when trying to oppose the logging
industry -- that's a long family tradition for many
loggers; or the drugs trade for crime families :-)
people can have very positive associations of pride
and tradition with activities that, objectively
viewed, are quite harmful.

It's easy to say that those people should just start
repairing and collecting bikes instead, but that's
a massive change of culture and context. I don't
know where one could even begin to talk to people
such as my neighbours about the idea of freedom from
cars. To them it would be like "freedom" from
everything that's familiar, the whole pattern of their
leisure time and family life. Hard to imagine how
one would not be perceived as coming like a thief
and a destroyer to *take away* something precious
from their lives. How do we get past this?

----------------

Cars are not just industry, they are culture... like
TV ads. Recently I was at a meeting to review a
police grant proposal for bike/pedestrian safety
measures. The grant had been strongly criticized for
pro-auto, anti-ped/bike bias. While waiting for the
meeting to begin I was sitting at the table with
police officers, safety analysts, etc. Their topic
of conversation: how sexy and cool the new car was
that one of the analysts had just bought; how much
she was looking forward to driving it on weekends;
how the superbowl game wasn't that great this year;
how they all thought the commercials were *the best
part* of the game.

So I sat there while these adult professionals
recited the scripts of commercials to each other,
laughing and slapping the table... and while they
all expressed their envy of the shiny new black
ragtop sports car and how much fun it would be to
drive it really fast w/the top down (nudge-nudge
wink-wink here from the traffic cops)... and this is
the *cultural* context from which they are making
decisions about public health and safety and urban
design.

When the other cyclists walked in to the discussion
in their bike clothes, helmets, etc. you could see
the laughter and camaraderie on the City staff's
faces die away: it was Us vs Them, the bike people
were like space aliens in that atmosphere of cosy
car-centred, TV-centred, commercialist culture. It
was a vivid illustration of what "mainstream" means
and what it means to be outside it. If you- all are
old enough to remember "hippies" and the reaction of
law enforcement officials in the bad old days to any
guy with long hair or a girl wearing too many beads,
then you know what I mean :-)

The cultural divide is daunting... dealing with
carcentrism (recent though it is) is just like
dealing with any other "ism" that's deeply
enculturated, like race or class or sex prejudice.
We learn it as kids ("You Have to be Carefully
Taught") and it's re-inforced every day of waking
life. Undoing it is very difficult.

So what I'm finally getting at here is that I
support Larisa's argument, that shaming and
insulting people is not the best way to change
hearts & minds on the ground... the divide is
already in place, and rock-throwing can only deepen
it. I wish I knew what would work better.

Venting our frustration does have its place -- say,
in political cartoons, satire, and sarcastic
rantings! A political cartoon lambasting the Unimog
is desperately needed :-) and I'm sure one will pop
up soon. Cartoons challenging American
overconsumption of resources, poking holes in
people's smugness and complacency, are part of the
countercultural effort (culture jammers have
developed a lot of other interesting ways to
"subvertise"). But on an individual or community
level, standing up in City or County meetings and
insulting the car-driving residents is unlikely to
get results. They close ranks against the zealots.
And wouldn't we do the same?

Every countercultural movement faces this burning
question: how to reach out to the opposition in
ways that are neither insulting nor condescending --
yet without watering down one's message to the point
of complete sell-out and ultimate futility. Argh.

----------------------

I do hope there's more than sheer laziness to appeal
to. After all, if Americans were *only* creatures of
total laziness, they wouldn't recycle; but in fact,
recycling programs are popular. Now, recycling is a
pathetic effort in the face of our overconsumption
(there was a very, very funny article in _The Onion_
on this topic a while back!). But the success of
popularizing it does show that people will make a
small extra effort if they feel it's worthwhile.
The trick is to expand the notion of what is
"worthwhile".

I like Adams' Hypermobility essay because he points
out that if you show people a car-centred
neighbourhood or city, and then you show them a
human-centred design, they will prefer the second
picture. So as well as appealing to laziness, car
reduction activists can offer people a choice --
which neighbourhood would you rather live in? and
would you be prepared to drive less in order to live
in the more pleasant one? Between the evident
advantages of fewer cars, and the willingness to
make small alterations of lifestyle if the social
consensus on good citizenship is shifted a bit,
there's some room to work *with* people.

Enough room? I dunno. If we didn't have multiple
billions of dollars being poured into propaganda
campaigns to keep people buying, buying, buying,
(and driving, driving, driving) it would be easier
to conduct this discussion in public. As it is, the
machineries of government and media are so strongly
biased towards the auto and road industry that it's
hard for any dissenting voice to be heard. A Polish
film maker once commented that the censorship of
governments can be protested, challenged, and even
defeated -- but the censorship of money is almost
impossible to overcome.

As usual, no answers. Only questions :-) I'm
curious to know what people on this list have done
themselves, personally, that has had any effect
on others (that we know of)...